And She Grew
by hotrockcandy
Summary: He's been in her life since the very beginning but they never really knew each other. And so she grew - with and without him. *Mass Effect Kink Meme* Prompt response! Father!Anderson fic. Non-sexual, full of FEELS. Rated Teen for language.


This is my first time ever posting a Mass Effect fic! I was hit with some serious inspiration by a kink meme prompt and decided to respond to it. I enjoyed writing it so much I decided to post it onto here! I added more stuff and cleaned it up a little. I hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as I loved writing it. I also posted this on AO3!

Just a warning...I'm HELLA rusty.

* * *

He remembered the first time he saw Phoebe. She was such a tiny little thing. A mistake, sure. But she was a beautiful one. He was sixteen when it happened. Young, dumb, and stupidly in love with the pretty redhead that attended school with him. When Hannah Shepard told him that she was pregnant, he was filled with fear he'd never felt before. He asked her what was she going to do with the baby and she told him she was going to have it. David had wanted it to be a secret, keep it from family until he had the balls to finally tell them what he had done. Hannah was three months pregnant when he finally told them. By then he had already made up his mind. He was going to join the Alliance when he graduated from high school. Take care of Hannah and their baby. Marry her. The works. Everything was for the baby. He had to grow up and be a man.

Hannah was scared to tell her parents, but with David as her strength she was able to talk to them. Their reaction was different than David's family. While disappointed, they respected the fact that he manned up and took responsibility for his actions. Hannah's family promptly disowned her and told her if she wanted to come back, to get rid of the child. The Anderson family took her in when she showed up with a bag full of her things and tears staining her cheeks. There wasn't anything they could do to get the Shepard family to accept their child back and the sadness was taking its toll on Hannah. That paired with the constant judging from other students and teachers, it seemed as though it was two against the world. It seemed as though the bigger Hannah got, the worst she was treated. But she held her head up high and dealt with the abuse with a level of dignity and maturity David wish he had. She was happy she was pregnant, and loved the idea of being a mother. She had plans to join the Alliance as well, wanting to get into engineering or even working in the medical field. It was the little things that kept her going.

They signed their lives away when she was 8 months pregnant. He asked Hannah to marry him outside of the Alliance building right before they entered. She said yes.

David Anderson was seventeen years old when Hannah went into labor. He was ready to leave for boot camp, a week away from three grueling months of pain. They had graduated high school. Hannah had done the impossible and finished school at the top of their class, much to the behest of the rest of the students and the teachers. Beauty and brains it seemed. That didn't do much for the twenty hours Hannah was in labor for. When Phoebe was born, David held her in his arms for the majority of the day. He knew he only had a week with her and had to make it count.

And so he did.

* * *

When Phoebe was three years old, David was one of the N7 program's most promising soldiers. He took to the military life like a fish took to water. Hannah was a different story. She _hated_ it. She endured for the sake of their child who had been given her mother's last name instead of his. When asked why they did that, it was so that the Shepard family wouldn't end with Hannah. The Anderson family had plenty of kin.

The best part of his day was seeing Hannah and Phoebe over vid chat before lights out. Phoebe took after Hannah more and more, but didn't have the red hair her mother was known for. Her hair was dark, her skin was tanned, but her eyes were green. Like her mother's. She was the perfect mix of her parents it seemed. She took her mother's beauty, but like her father she had a stubbornness that David jokingly said was an Anderson trait. She agreed with him and they shared a laugh. The call ended with Phoebe giving her father an exaggeratedly blown kiss and Hannah waving goodbye.

That was the last time he seen Hannah alive.

It had been raining, they told him. The car hydroplaned and the driver couldn't stop. Hannah died instantly. David wanted Phoebe to come stay with him but Jon Grissom advised against it. Especially with an unavoidable war in the distant horizon. David had to agree to let Phoebe get taken into the system. Hannah's family didn't want Phoebe, and when David asked his parents to take her, they couldn't leave the colony they were on. The Andersons were too spread out in the galaxy and with Phoebe on Earth there wasn't much to be done. He had to allow his little girl to get put through the system and he hated it.

He ended up serving during the First Contact War. Phoebe was put aside but not forgotten about.

It had only taken three months.

* * *

Phoebe was seven years old when David Anderson married Cynthia. By then, with his military career taking off in the way it did after the war, the little girl was the last thing on his mind. He was sure she was well taken care of and when his family asked about her, he told them the same thing. He received current pictures of her once in a while and he was happy with the fact that she was alive and well. He was sure she had no idea who he was and he was surprisingly content with that. He knew there were people bound to be after him (Especially anti-human groups who want revenge for the lost Turian lives from the war) and she would immediately be made a target if it came out that he had an illegitimate daughter. That on top of political red tape (Including it becoming a huge scandal.) and a new wife, made it difficult to bring up. He couldn't just spring it on her and he never wanted to.

Phoebe was eleven years old when Cynthia divorced him. He was the XO of the SSV Hastings then.

Everything he had put aside, everything he had bottled up came out. He thought he had taken out his sadness over losing Hannah with the war. Thought he had moved on with Cynthia but he was wrong. The fact that he couldn't be a father to his only child, and didn't even have the willpower or the guts to take her back added onto his depression and he spent a month in recluse on the citadel, drinking his sadness away. When he learned that Jon Grissom had an unknown daughter of his own during a mission, that sadness was replaced with rage. He confronted the man after the mission and learned that Phoebe had run away from her orphanage in Vancouver. He ordered intelligence to find her immediately.

She was fifteen when he finally found her.

Phoebe had joined a powerful Los Angeles gang called the Tenth Street Reds. From what David learned, she really took after her father and promptly rose in ranks of the gang.

The only picture of Phoebe at that point was a mug shot. She looked so much like her mother, David had to take a moment to compose himself. He couldn't believe how much his daughter had lost herself. She wore her hair short and cropped close to her scalp. On her shoulder was a tattoo that showed her status as a gang member. Heavy make up on her eyes, and a sneer on her beautiful face. On her mother's face. He needed to intervene.

He left for Earth two days later after asking for a leave of absence.

When he met Phoebe, he didn't know what to expect. He hadn't seen her in person since she was a little girl.

It was 2170 when he sat down with her in an interrogation room. Acted like a recruiter for the Alliance. Anything to get her out of that life. Without knowing the man in front of her was her father, Phoebe promptly told David to take his offer and to shove it up his ass.

That Anderson stubbornness it seemed.

He took an entire month to talk to Phoebe and to get to know her. Eventually she started to crack and she finally let him in. He learned about her life, learned about what had happened to her. Why she left the orphanage. Why she joined an anti-alien group. She told him she didn't believe in human superiority and only wanted to survive. The gang offered her food, shelter, and status.

David told her that the military offered the same thing and paid better. He would sponsor her and everything. She just had to do six months of jail time and everything would be forgiven.

April 11th, 2172 Phoebe Shepard joined the Alliance.

* * *

David couldn't be her father…but he was definitely a father figure. He had been there for her every step of the way, keeping in touch with the girl and watching her blossom from a young lady to a woman. She took to military life like a fish took to water, another Anderson trait it seemed. Or maybe she was just too much like David. A lot of people would joke about Phoebe secretly being his daughter and he would join in with the laughter, all while knowing that the jokes were very very close to the truth.

It didn't help that she looked a little like him. Same eye shape. Same ears. He was finding little things that seemed damning. That someone was going to look at the two of them together and figure it out. She even became an N7 in the same amount of time it took him to reach that rank.

He was there during the ceremony when she accepted her rank. Arcturus Station was packed with spectators and when he got up to say his speech, he wanted it over as soon as he made it to the podium. What could he say? A bunch of empty words that sounded good to the media. To the brass. When he was finished the medals were presented. Jon Grissom handed them out like clockwork and David went along with it. Handful of new N7s. Congratulate, shake of the hand, a smile for the camera, rinse and repeat.

It was all hollow for him.

Even when he stepped up to Phoebe and shook her hand, he wasn't really there. Smile for the camera while deep inside he wanted to scream. A pat on the back for a job well done. A shiny piece of metal to attach to a lapel. Status. Labels. And he knew. He could feel Grissom staring at him. Waiting for a reaction that'll give it away and bring ruin to the Alliance Navy. For a moment he wanted to. Fuck the brass. Fuck the regulations. Actions spoke louder than words. But he couldn't do it…and Jon knew it. So he moved on to the next N7, leaving Phoebe behind to shake Hackett's hand.

Rinse and repeat.

Before she left for Akuze, he wished her luck.

After Akuze, David stuck around the hospital Phoebe had been placed in. The only one who survived the attack from Thresher Maws.

For a moment he wished that she hadn't. And that scared him.

When she requested that she join him on the Normandy as his Executive Officer, he couldn't say no. After all she was the best.

He wanted to tell her. He really did. He wanted to tell her everything. About her mother. About him. About her family who stopped asking about her years ago. When she became his second in command he was proud. When he gave her the Normandy and watched her come into her own as a Commander and a Spectre (a feat he himself couldn't achieve) he was beside himself.

When she was docked by the Council and prevented from heading out to stop Saren, he didn't hesitate or question her request to stop Udina.

He sure as hell didn't question punching the man out and putting in the correct codes that would release her from all the political bullshit that came with the military and the government.

He only wished he could have joined her instead of sitting in a cell for attacking an ambassador.

When she saved the Citadel from Sovereign and Saren…when she stepped out of the rubble of the embassies, a little banged up but alive he took all his willpower to not gather the hardened woman in his arms and to give her a giant hug. He had forgotten all about his desire to want her gone. To help him save face by her own demise. That was his daughter and he couldn't ask for anyone better for the title.

And then she gave him a gift. She gave Udina the finger and told the Council that she wanted Anderson to join them. Fuck being a Spectre when you can just become a part of the Galactic Government and be the voice of Humanity. She told him that exact thing when he asked her why over drinks. She trusted him but above all, she respected him. And in her own little way…she grew to love him.

She still didn't know.

* * *

When Phoebe died, Anderson had to take several days to contain himself from the grief he felt. His heart was broken. He had lost not only a fine soldier, a great woman, a wonderful daughter, but the last remaining physical memory of Hannah.

The memorial was hard.

The two years of grief was harder…

That ended when rumors started popping up that she was alive and working for Cerberus.

He didn't believe it until she showed up, flanked by a Cerberus agent and former C-Sec Agent Garrus Vakarian who looked worse for wear. She had glowing cybernetic lines all over her face, showing just how far Cerberus had gone to bring her back to life.

He was just happy to see her. After some unpleasant but needed Council business was taken care of, David took some time to talk to her and ask what happened. They talked briefly and she had to be on her way, trying to save human colonies from the Collectors.

She had only been back for a week and it was as if she hadn't been dead for two years.

Anderson stubbornness made sure she got all the help she could muster from the Council. It got her Spectre reinstatement. It got her the ability to build an entire team to fight the Collectors for a suicide mission and it got her to the Collector base and back in one piece.

It also got her court-marshaled after she destroyed a Mass Relay in order to prevent the Reapers from entering the Bahak system. She took over 300 thousand Batarian lives. Ruthless arithmetic it seemed. 300 thousand lives over the lives of the galaxy and she never apologized for her actions.

It was the first and only time David was even remotely disappointed in Phoebe. He understood why...he only wished it hadn't been her to make the call.

When the Reapers came six months later it didn't matter anymore.

* * *

The entire time he fought on Earth, he thought of Phoebe and what she was doing. Never in a million years did he think that his own child, brought from teenage stupidity, with strength forged by initial neglect but hardened through military life, would be the savior of the galaxy.

She brought all races together for this battle, ending the Genophage and thus ending conflict between the Krogan and the Turians. She stopped the war between the Geth and the Quarians, issuing a peace between the AI and their creators. She even destroyed Cerberus for good.

He was beyond proud of her.

No words could describe how he felt. Even when he was in the crucible with her, beaten and bloodied and dying. The Illusive man had forced her to shoot him in the gut and that seemed to be the final straw for his poor body. It was shutting down. She eventually put a bullet between The Illusive Man's eyes and it took all of his strength to just sit up with her after it was all said and done.

For the last time, he felt tired. She told him she thought they deserved a rest.

He had agreed.

"Stay with me. We're almost through this."

With his tired mind he could only muster up a few words to say to her.

"You did good, child. You did good. I'm proud of you."

He turned his head and looked at her. He hadn't looked at her like that since he held her in his arms for the first time. In that hospital with Hannah sleeping soundly behind them, tired from the twenty plus hours of labor. For a moment he was back in the hospital, the memory was so vivid he could feel the tiny weight of the woman sitting next to him in his arms. It was that moment he knew he would do anything for her. He would love her despite her faults. He would raise her to be better than he could ever become. In the end he made good on his word.

Hannah would have been _so_ proud of her.

That was the last thing he thought about, the last thing he remembered, as his life left him.

The voice of his little girl carried him on to the peaceful black. Mature and strong.

"Thank you, sir."

He didn't tell her that he had left everything to her in his will. The apartment on the Citadel had been only a part of the gifts he left for her. Something for every birthday he missed. Every milestone he couldn't celebrate with her properly.

He didn't tell her that one of the things he left her was a special graybox that contained the truth of her parentage. He didn't tell her that he loved her with all his heart…

But he didn't need to.

She already knew. 

**~Fin~**

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Thank you so much for reading! Please review!


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